Giants Take Some Time to Feel Like a Team Again

Ask any football coach what is most important at the start of training camp, and you are likely to hear about rhythm. Quarterbacks and receivers must establish timing and rhythm. The whole offense must find its rhythm. Practices must fall into a predictable, up-tempo rhythm.

Unfortunately, the start of this camp, particularly for the Giants, has been arrhythmic.

Every N.F.L. team had to deal with the sudden end of the lockout, the frenetic transaction period, the complex rules governing when free agents could take the field and the elimination of two-a-day contact practices. The problem has been acute for the Giants, who were forced to practice without many key players before the collective bargaining agreement was ratified on Thursday, then reverted to noncontact practices once the veteran free agents finally arrived.

It has been highly syncopated. And Tom Coughlin is not a bebop kind of coach.

When camp opened July 29, Coughlin said it would take “the better part of a week” for the team to settle into a rhythm. That timetable proved nearly accurate, but there were plenty of hiccups along the way. The team scheduled a day off last Tuesday, three days after the official start of business. The timing of the break was one of many oddities in this oddest of starts to a season.

“I don’t think it has ever been done in the history of football,” Coughlin said of the early day off.

When it appeared Wednesday night that labor negotiations would further delay the arrival of the team’s veteran free agents, who were not allowed even to watch practice from the sideline until the agreement was ratified, Coughlin was clearly frustrated.

“We have to all get on the same field, for crying out loud,” he said.

Even the ratification of the agreement did not mean the return of business as usual. After the first full-contact practice last Wednesday night, the Giants were back in shells and shorts on Thursday and Friday. They did not want to expose the veterans who had signed new contracts — including newcomers like center David Baas and tight end Ben Patrick, and returning veterans like running backs Ahmad Bradshaw and Brandon Jacobs and defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka — to the risks of full-pad practices after a week of relative inactivity.

An alternate schedule was in the works in case the labor situation was not settled, though Coughlin was clearly not enthusiastic about using it.

“I changed this schedule in order to accommodate everybody,” he said Thursday, “and I have another schedule which, God forbid if we have to go back to, but we’ll do it.” It never came to that.

So after one week of training camp, and three days of informal workouts and meetings, the Giants held only one full-pad practice. And many important players, like the starting center and both starting running backs, did not participate in that session.

The Giants finally have some semblance of a normal practice schedule, with six days to go before their preseason opener against the Carolina Panthers. The week of confusion and underattended practices, coming on the heels of a lockout that forbade coaches to speak with players, forces the Giants to cram a lot of work into a limited time. And you cannot cram rhythm.

Baas, for instance, was not allowed to snap the ball to Eli Manning until Thursday’s practice. Center-quarterback timing does not develop immediately, nor does communication among interior offensive linemen, who must anticipate one another’s moves in pass protection.

“It does take some chemistry,” Pat Flaherty, the offensive line coach, said. “When you have played against an adjacent lineman over the years, it’s a physical communication; you don’t even have to talk. That is something we’ll have to develop.”

When asked if such complex chemistry can develop in a few weeks, Flaherty said: “There is no ‘can.’ You have to.”

Publicly, most coaches and players are taking a “football is football” stance about the extended off-season and week of limited practices. But Robert Nunn, the defensive line coach, said that some of his players were having difficulty getting back into a groove: Justin Tuck and Jason Pierre-Paul were among those who told him they felt awkward or out of sync during the practice in pads. The only way to make the players comfortable is to get them on the field, and not just once or twice.

“You can’t just put pads on and be back at home,” Nunn said.

The Giants do have some advantages over other N.F.L. teams. Coughlin and the coordinators Kevin Gilbride and Perry Fewell all returned from last season, so they do not have to install new systems. Some assistants were able to give players instructions before the lockout: Dave Merritt provided his safeties with a DVD of game film with his voiceovers for them to study.

The evening practice schedule also had an unforeseen benefit during Thursday’s ratification vote. The Giants started their 6 p.m. session on time, but many other teams had to adjust their practice schedules while waiting for the ballots to be counted.

Still, the constricted timeline has forced Giants coaches to prioritize. “You have to focus on the little things that win championships,” cornerbacks coach Peter Giunta said. For example, the Giants are emphasizing interception returns this season, so coaches are devoting extra time to a drill in which defenders block for a teammate, punt return-style. Time dedicated to interception returns is time taken away from something else.

“If some coverage or some blitz doesn’t get installed because of that, so be it,” Giunta said. On offense, the team did not start installing its three-receiver package, which it uses on nearly 50 percent of offensive plays, until midweek, Manning said.

From system installation to basic personnel evaluations, coaches and players are engaging in “get to know you” activities that usually occur in early May, not early August. The greatest challenge for coaches will be to learn the strengths and limitations of their players, and to adjust their schemes accordingly. Nunn used the three-safety defensive strategy the Giants deployed last season as an example of how coaches match their system to the available talent. The idea of using safeties Kenny Phillips, Antrel Rolle and Deon Grant in the same package started to take shape during minicamps last year, then evolved through training camp and into the season.

If such a strategy evolves at all this year, it will do so in a compressed time frame.

“It’s all crunched up now,” Nunn said. “Because live bullets start flying next Saturday.”


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